On Sat, 13 Jun 2009 23:39:52 +0200, Sascha Hlusiak wrote: > How do you know how many processes are running? What does 'top' say > about CPU usage and load? Maybe dnetc has two threads, which can each > occupy a core, so you have still 4 threads that are running, in 3 > processes. You still should get a load of 5 or higher. > You don't have a lot of IO load, do you?
Technically, in the scenario I described, I only have two processes, as dnetc is running with four threads. To simplify the situation, I created a simple Python script that does nothing other than loop indefinitely. I then start four separate nice 19 copies of it in four separate terminals. At this point, top reports that each CPU is almost entirely executing niced code. Load average is a little bit above 4, as expected. At this point, I leave these four copies running, and execute a fifth copy without nicing it, so it ends up with a nice value of 0. At this point, cpu0 is executing almost 100% user. cpu2 and cpu3 are executing almost 100% nice. Finally, cpu1 is almost 100% idle. (The actual CPU numbering seems to shift around every so often.) Thus, I have five processes, four at nice 19, one at nice 0, a load average of just over 5, but only 3 out of the 4 cores are actually doing anything.
